Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Golden Hawks | 1978 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 2 | Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola | 1986 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 3 | The Late Great Human Road Show | 1986 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 4 | Enemy Women | 2002 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 5 | Stormy Weather | 2007 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 6 | The Color of Lightning | 2009 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 7 | Lighthouse Island | 2013 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 8 | News of the World | 2016 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 9 | Simon the Fiddler | 2020 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 10 | Chenneville | 2023 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
Paulette Jiles’s standalone novels cover a wide span of time and subject matter. Her earliest novels, The Golden Hawks (1978) and The Late Great Human Road Show (1986), come from her years in Canada and are quite different from the work she is best known for today. Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola (1986) is a satirical novel about media and travel. It was not until Enemy Women (2002) that she turned to the American historical fiction that would define her later career.
From 2002 onward, most of her novels are set in 19th-century Texas and the surrounding regions. The Color of Lightning (2009) follows Britt Johnson, a freed Black man in post-Civil War Texas searching for family members taken by Kiowa raiders. News of the World (2016), her most famous book, follows Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd as he escorts a young girl who was raised by the Kiowa back to her surviving relatives. Simon the Fiddler (2020) and Chenneville (2023) are also set in the years just after the Civil War. Lighthouse Island (2013) is an exception, a futuristic novel set in a drought-stricken America.